Data Protection aspects of CROSSBOW

Today the world is celebrating the Data Privacy Day (known in Europe as Data Protection Day) to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices.

In Europe this date corresponds to the anniversary of the opening for signature of the Council of Europe’s “Convention 108” for the Protection of individuals with regard to automatic processing of personal data which has been for over 30 years a cornerstone of data protection, in Europe and beyond.

Last year, the European Commission has published a guidance note on ethics and data protection, which sets out to ensure that all projects are guided by ethical considerations. It focuses on ethical issues related to research data on Horizon 2020 projects and not on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) implementation aspects at institutional level.

CROSSBOW project, as many H2020 projects, collects user-related data, so the consortium has to comply with all European and national legislation and directives relevant to the country where the data collections are taking place. The collection, processing and transmission of data are analysed under the principles of:

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union;

The European Convention on Human Rights;

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention 108 for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data;

Directive 95/46/EC & Directive 2002/58/EC (and its amendment 2006/24/EC) of the European parliament regarding issues with privacy and protection of personal data and the free movement of such data; and

The national laws applying its provisions.

Any additional regulations at national level that do not fall under the Directive and apply to data protection or any other sensitive information are also taken into account for CROSSBOW project development.

In first quarter of 2019, the he consortium will publish a deliverable on privacy and data protection in a multi-actor environment.